Hay Festival 2011: Mansoura Ez Eldin's hero of free speech

On a hot summer day at secondary school, in a small, isolated Egyptian village, I got acquainted with Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid’s name. I was reading every book I could lay my hands on. I’d read Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Friedrich Nietzsche and many others, but I was never introduced to Islamic philosophy. It seemed to me a remote subject that didn’t suit the modern age, until I read Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid. Through his writings I became close to Ibn Rushd, Ibn Arabi and other Islamic thinkers. Abu Zaid, a theologian born in 1943, was deciphering what seemed to me gibberish and training me to think critically and rationally.

Once at college in Cairo I learnt that instead of appreciating his contributions, he was subjected to a relentless attack and slander by those in authority. Some Islamic clergymen started to curse him and accuse him of being an atheist.

I started to reread Abu Zaid, this time with a sceptical eye, but I was only more impressed by him: his courage, his strength in defending his ideas against those who charged him with atheism and declared killing him lawful – as if killing someone will prevent his enlightening ideas from spreading. Those fanatics who searched his thoughts and words looking for evidence to condemn him never knew that views have wings, and that their persecution of Abu Zaid turned him into a symbol of freedom of thought and expression.

Abu Zaid reluctantly left Egypt to teach in Leiden University in the Netherlands but my admiration of his courage and self-sacrifice for the sake of noble ideas intensified. Fanatics saw his tackling of the Koran as a linguistic text as a threat. Minds so used to living in darkness and compliance are threatened when others scrutinise their ideas.

During the recent Egyptian revolution, while I was standing in Tahrir Square, Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid came to my mind. I wished he could have witnessed this moment. He died a year ago but I felt as if his ghost was standing beside me. I will always remember him as a hero of freedom of thinking and expression in a country in which a writer can pay dearly because of his thoughts and words. There are a few who have the courage to maintain honour and dignity of their words in such situations. Nasr Hamed Abu Zaid was one such person.

Mansoura Ez Eldin is an Egyptian novelist and journalist. Her most recent book is Beyond Paradise (El-Ain Publishing, 2009). Mansoura is one of the Beirut39; a Hay Festival collaboration project which celebrates 39 of the best Arab authors under 40.